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Would a 1960s Fallout Shelter Actually Protect You From Nuclear War?

It's a good question, and one that's getting more timely.

Jan 15, 2018

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Q: Would a 1960s-era designated “Fallout Shelter” help me in a nuclear attack today?

A: We’ve all seen those yellow and black signs, emblazoned with three triangles, announcing the presence nearby of a fallout shelter. These are, at this point, antiques, vestiges of a more innocent time; a time when we liked to cling to the notion that a nuclear attack was readily survivable, sort of like a tornado, but with more gamma rays and fewer flying cows.

Truthfully, fallout shelters were never all they were cracked up to be. Rolled out in the early 1960s by the now-defunct Office of Civil Defense, they were never as well-equipped or funded as originally envisioned, which, frankly, didn’t much matter. The advent of thermonuclear warheads—high-yield hydrogen bombs much more powerful than those dropped on Japan during World War II—rendered them moot. Fallout shelters were often spaces like concrete-walled basements that could be retrofitted with air filtration systems, intended to protect occupants from the radioactive byproducts of a modest nuclear detonation. They’d have been superfluous under a genuine onslaught of commie megatons.

"You would just be dead from the initial blast.”

“You wouldn’t really have to deal with fallout,” says Jeff Schlegelmilch, deputy director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University. “Because you would just be dead from the initial blast.” Kind of a good news/bad news scenario, we suppose.

As to whether these shelters “still work,” one first has to consider whether they “still exist.” Suppose that, rattled by Kim Jong-un’s latest rhetoric, or perhaps concerned at the prospect of leaky X-ray machines in your dentist’s office, you were lured by one of those old signs to seek shelter. “Spoiler alert,” says Schlegelmilch, “there is most likely no fallout shelter in the building.” At least not in the sense you might imagine. “Buildings probably have repurposed those shelters in the past few decades,” says Nancy Silvestri of New York City’s Emergency Management Department. “They probably turned them back into laundry rooms and things like that.” You will undoubtedly get some strange looks when you crouch behind the dryers, screaming “duck and cover!” at your bewildered audience of Tide-slinging housekeepers and homemakers.

That’s not to say that they’re any less effective at shielding you from radiation now that they’re more likely to contain Maytags than MREs. “These locations were chosen because they either already were or could be easily retrofitted into rooms that could block the radiation,” says Schlegelmilch. “There may not be supplies. I don’t know if the ventilation systems would still be functional, but theoretically they could provide some protection from radioactive fallout as is.”

The ultimate irony, Schlegelmilch notes, is that such shelters might be more useful today than they were in their prime. “With the kind of threats we would see from terrorist organizations—even some weapons that North Korea has demonstrated capacity for—you are looking at weapons that would take out many blocks but throw radiation much farther through the mushroom cloud.” So maybe it’s worth noticing those old signs after all—and packing some laundry in a go-bag to pass the time while you wait for the dust to settle, so to speak.

This story appears in the January/February 2018 issue. Do you have unusual questions about how things work and why stuff happens? This is the place to ask them. Don’t be afraid. Nobody will laugh at you here. Email greatunknowns@popularmechanics.com.

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